I chose art history because I thought I would enjoy studying it, and because I had some vague idea that it would be cool to work at a museum. (Woe to me when I interned at an art museum and discovered that most of what people do all day is raise money, and the job I actually enjoyed was being a docent…which is a volunteer position.)

Art history is a blend of history—that is, understanding the context within which an artwork was created and the chronological series of events that led to the artwork’s creation and its life since—narrative—understanding how and why an artist made their work, and where the work fits into the time and place in which it was created—and decoding and investigation—parsing the symbols an artist chooses to include in their work, determining the age of an artwork, determining who actually produced a work of art if it’s unsigned, and trying to figure out what the artist intended to do.

It’s this last part that I really enjoyed. Is the wife in the Arnolfini Marriage Portrait pregnant? I don’t know, but I seem to recall reading an article in college that pointed to the particular sac-like shape of the red curtain behind her signifying something of a uterine nature.

Decoding paintings is really fun. It’s like knowing a secret language. Take the saints, for instance. Artists have tended to follow the same tropes for hundreds of years when painting the saints, and if you know which accessories go with which saint, you can identify who’s in the picture. Old guy with keys? That’s St. Peter, holding the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Hot guy with a bunch of arrows in him? That’s St. Sebastian, martyred for his belief in Christ. Chick holding a towel with a picture of Jesus on it? That’s St. Veronica. She gave Jesus her veil to wipe his face with while he was carrying the cross, and afterward his face appeared on the veil (vera for true + ica for icon or image = veronica).

Flowers also tend to have consistent meanings across paintings. White lilies signify the Virgin Mary while poppies can connote death, roses are for love and tulips are for prosperity. Unless the flowers are wilting or dead in which case they’re there to remind us we too will wither and die.

In art history, the artist’s intent is paramount. Your reaction to the work—how it makes you feel, what you think it means, how you may incorporate that perceived meaning into your life—is secondary to what it “actually” means. And I say actually in quotes because intent and meaning are highly debatable among scholars, especially with very old paintings where little is known about the artist and little if anything survives of their personal writings to help us get into their head. It’s all (well-informed and usually well-intentioned) conjecture.

Take the following two paintings by Frans Hals. The first is the Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse and the second is the Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse. both painted in 1664.

What do we notice? They’re painted in a very loose style, typical of Hals’s late work. These are, in fact, commonly believed to be his last two paintings. They’re very dark. Vincent Van Gogh famously remarked to his brother Theo that Hals must have had 27 shades of black, as there’s so much variability of tone when you see his paintings up close. The sitters don’t look particularly happy, nor do they even look nice. The three men on the right side of the portrait form an odd triangle with faces that seem to convey drunkenness, menace, and sloth, respectively. The men on the left, especially the third from the left, seem better disposed, if a little aloof. The women all look aggrieved and sallow, with the one all the way on the left and the second from the right in particular fairly glowering out at the viewer. For the benevolent patrons of a charity institution, these are hardly flattering portraits of their goodwill and inner light.

In his seminal book on art history, Ways of Seeing, John Berger tells us that Hals was a chronically destitute man who’d narrowly avoided freezing to death by begging for three loads of peat moss in the winter of 1664, the same year in which he painted these portraits of the very people who would have been in charge of doling out charity and deciding who was worthy, and who was not. Knowing this background necessarily changes how we view the paintings, from two group portraits of fairly severe Dutch Protestants to social critique.

Berger takes issue with traditional art historical scholarship that would say Hals was an objective observer, not allowing a petty thing like the fact that he’s alive only due to the whims of the people in these paintings keep him from making them look their best. And maybe this is their best. Maybe he was an objective observer. The paintings were well received and were hung in the Almshouse, which is now the Frans Hals museum. As far as we know, the people in these paintings, including Drunky McSaucedalot, were happy with how they turned out. But still. Told the background, we can’t un-know the relationship Hals would have had with his sitters, and the power asymmetry therein.

Berger writes: “…the Regents and Regentesses stare at Hals, a destitute old painter who has lost his reputation and lives off pubic charity; he examines them through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e., must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper. This is the drama of these paintings. A drama of an unforgettable contrast.”

We don’t know for certain what Hals’s feelings were about his subjects, but we can infer a great amount, and that intent, whether he strove to be objective or sly, colors what we see in his paintings, and how we react to them.

Artistic intent is everything, we are told when we study art history, but this is interesting to me because it is not necessarily the same way in writing.

Like I said I studied art in college, not literature. I’ve regrettably never taken a college literature class, and so I’d never heard the term, “literary theory” until a few months ago. I won’t go too deep into it because a lot of it is far over my head (I’m currently working through these free Yale seminars right now and they’re great, if very dense.) But literary theory attempts to answer the questions: What is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose?

‘How can it be understood’ is the area I want to speak about briefly, because I believe most contemporary scholars, critics, and writers agree with Roland Barthes (and John Green), that authorial intent is secondary to a reader’s response to a work. “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,” Barthes wrote in 1967. The reader creates meaning in a book, not the author. She brings with her all her history, prejudices, loves, fears, and expectations to the reading experience and produces a response symbiotically with the text. Each book is personal to each reader, no two people coming away from a book having had the same experience, nor deriving precisely the same meaning.

Is Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan a tragic figure hemmed in by mens’ expectations, or a money hungry skank who ended up with what she deserved? Different readers will have different opinions, and they’re both probably right.

I think (some) readers hate this. I think the emphasis in high school English classes on figuring out the author’s intent, on decoding the symbols and themes of a novel to arrive at some A+ über-meaning such that all ambiguities are erased is very tempting, but can also be frustrating and maybe fruitless. When I do book events I often get questions about what I meant, or what a certain thing was meant to symbolize. All of this is fair and I don’t mind answering these questions. I have them myself. I’m not sure I’ve ever truly understood the meaning of the red rose petals in American Beauty.

I try to answer these questions as best I can, but I often do the annoying thing authors (and therapists) always do and ask the reader what they think a particular thing means. Because I don’t think it matters very much what I think. There’s no DVD commentary on a novel. You can’t text me while you’re reading to see what I meant on page 35 when I said the campfire smoke was making a shape like a mountain. You’re ingesting the book and part of that is deciding what it all means.

If I start describing a tense date at a fancy French restaurant, you’ve immediately got a picture in your head. Even if I tell you the tablecloths were blue instead of white and the restaurant was in suburban Syracuse in winter instead of trendy SOHO in summer, you’re already coming to the story with your own images that conform to your own ideas of “fancy,” “French,” and “restaurant” as well as “tense” and “date.” I’m giving you most of the story and forming most of the picture in your head, but it’s impossible for me to say everything that could be said. A gap will always open up between what I say what you perceive. That gap is where the meaning of the work is made.

So this is the question I’ve been thinking about this week. Why does artistic intent matter so much in visual art, but less so in creative writing? I don’t have an answer. Maybe contemporary art is as open to interpretation as contemporary literature, and my examples from 400 years ago can’t be analogous to anything created today. Maybe writers in the 1600s were also working with established tropes and symbols and thus we should view their work as something to be decoded and understood rather than as something to be subsumed into ourselves. Maybe (probably) I haven’t through through the question enough to have a satisfying answer. Does context matter in the case of Hals’s paintings of his benefactors? I think so. But then again maybe I’m putting too much of myself into the interpretation, killing the painter at the cost of privileging myself as the viewer.

Stuff I’ve read:

I just finished The Baby on the Fire Escape, a fascinating look at how creativity and motherhood often do not coexist peacefully. By examining the lives of artists and mothers like Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Audre Lorde, the author attempts to understand how one may be a great artist and a great mother, or whether one role must perish in pursuit of the other.

I also just read Twenty Minutes of Silence by Helene Bessette, which was a long poem about a murder. Inspired by a true story, Bessette’s novel wrestles with the story of a teenage boy accused of killing his father and the fact that the family waited twenty minutes after the murder to contact authorities. I was skeptical, but was very quickly engrossed and loved how it deals with ambiguity and speculation.

I had a recent event with Isabelle Mongeau, author of the new fantasy saga, The Debtor’s Game. In Mongeau’s novel fairies are born saddled with debt to the high fae who lord over them, and wear these debts in the form of tattoos all over their bodies. Timely, disturbing, and all-too-real, this is a novel that will stick with you.

And finally, Sourland by Ariel Delgado Dixon, a dirty, sexy novel about a love triangle between three weed farmers, and what happens when one of them unexpectedly disappears. Dixon is an actual farmer herself, and her writing sparkles with the first-hand descriptions that can only come from someone who’s sweated through a harvest and pulled a newborn calf wet and wriggling from its mother.

Upcoming events:

And if you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be doing an event with Paul Tremblay on 6/30 at Brookline Booksmith for his new novel Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep.

And I’ll be hosting Gish Jen at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on 9/22 for her latest book, Bad Bad Girl.

xoxo,

Elizabeth

Tillie Olson, who lived from 1912 to 2007, was among the first generation of American feminist writers. Her most famous short story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” has been widely taught and anthologized, and speaks on parenting in an unsupportive society, and the dreams and hopes mothers often have to put on a shelf in the service of raising their children—realities Olson knew intimately. She began writing in the 1930s, but did not publish her first short story collection until 1961, due to the demands of housework and raising her children.

In 1978 she published her landmark work of literary criticism Silences, which explores the gaps in the resumes of women and working class writers who had to step away from their art, sometimes for decades, because they were looking after family members, making a living, suffering illness, or otherwise fighting the myriad societal forces ranged against them.

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences … I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences—what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony), that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.”

Herman Melville is one such writer whose career was stifled throughout his life by his Customs House job, leaving only evenings and Sundays to write. In a letter to friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, he complained, “Dollars damn me. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, that can seldom be mine.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t begin writing until her sixties, as it wasn’t until then that she had the “silent grass-growing mood” necessary to get her stories down on paper. Any mother (or modern worker) knows that distraction reigns when other people are around (or, thanks to technology, even when they’re not). And distraction is absolute poison to writing. Olson writes:

“More than in any human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.”

Writer expressed this beautifully in a recent comic she posted to Instagram.

It’s not just the interruptions, but the mental load, that feels so taxing many days. Remembering everything from which kid eats which food, to what upcoming events require gifts, to unpaid bills, to bathroom breaks for the dog—can fill every available space in the brain, and the endless to-do lists engendered by this remembering can make the day feel like standing on one side of a tennis court swatting away a constant stream of balls. No matter how many tasks you knock away, more just keep coming.

So this brings me to the last year and what I’ve been up to: A lot. And not a lot. I published interviews with Cleyvis Natera, Silvia Moreno Garcia, A. Natasha Joukovsky (whose Substack is delightful), Bret Anthony Johnston, and George Saunders. I won a Mass Cultural Council Arts Grant. I was on the awesome podcast, Finding the Throughline (Part 1 and Part 2). I was named a Writer in Residence at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. I saw Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Waiting for Godot on Broadway. I gave lectures in Chicago and Boston. I did events in Provincetown and Baltimore. I planned a bar mitzvah, built a veggie patch (and subsequently grew about 250lbs of tomatoes and squashes, no cap), renovated the entire upstairs of my house, threw a big holiday party, learned to read Torah, (nearly) completed the Duolingo course on Finnish, bought a bike, and took yoga, Zumba, and ballet classes for the first time ever. I read 68 books.

What I didn’t do, however, was finish Letter To My Husband’s Mistress, my novel in progress.

I have been working on it. Truly. I wrote 1.75 pages yesterday. But the fact that it’s not done is driving me crazy. Especially as I’d begun it with so much wind in my sails, that I believed it would be the first easy project I’d ever undertaken. That artistic unicorn that just sort of comes out right the first time. The first 60 pages flew from my fingers onto the keyboard. Then the next sixty pages came a little slower, and were stymied by a lot of personal and professional interruptions, but they came, if not easily, then without the maximum of effort that went into, say, 90% of The Bullet Swallower. That book was a slog from day one. But LTMHM was always different. It felt fully formed in a way my other books hadn’t, and all I had to do was just capture the feeling before it got too distant.

But last year got complicated. My father-in-law passed away, The Bullet Swallower film adaptation stalled, and I was burned out by a very hectic 2024 spent writing, traveling, promoting, and getting a crash course in screenwriting in situ in Hollywood. I’d hit a wall. And though I tried to write, most days I’d open the Word document, get completely overwhelmed at the thought of having to decide what would happen next, and then scroll Reddit for 3 hours. It was not fun.

I was flailing around for answers and came across The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a self-help guide for anyone trying to tap into or recapture their creativity. It was helpful, though her insistence on daily free writing was far too big of a commitment for me, despite that I believe it works. I also read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, How Fiction Works by James Wood, Writing Down the Bones, and several other writing manuals, but after 6 or 7 books I realized the answer to my problem wasn’t going to be found through research.

I just didn’t feel like writing. To let you in on a (not so secret) secret, I actually hate writing. And this isn’t uncommon. Lots of writers (most writers?) hate writing. For real.

Writing a novel is like trying to solve problems you don’t understand using tools that haven’t been invented yet. It’s unsurprisingly unpleasant to sit down and try to make decisions for an entire cast of make believe people, and try to make their decisions and problems interesting and relevant to another entire cast of potential readers, many of whom will hate everything you do no matter how well you do it. I’m not even going to get into the myriad problems and uncertainties facing the publishing industry right now. But even ignoring the professional perils, it’s just a lonely, ego-killing, emotionally debilitating job that requires you to be simultaneously vulnerable and impervious, humble and narcissistic, intro and extroverted, and above all, utterly selfish. Selfish about your time, your space, your investment in other people’s lives.

Even if I desperately wanted to write all the time, and loved the endless possibilities of a blank page, I always come up against the limitations of time. And we know that’s in short supply for all of us.

Writing takes TIME. T-I-M-E. So. Much. TIIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEE. Not just time to write but time to sit, to think, to pace around the room, to scribble things on paper, to lie on the floor with your feet elevated in a vain attempt to get more blood to your brain. To read. To sit some more. To print out everything you’ve written and shuffle it up and see if it’s better when it’s all out of order. Writers need time. Unbroken, uninterrupted, quiet, distractionless and solitary time.

I’ve already been writing this particular post for 4 hours, during which time I’ve had to take 2 phone calls, take the dog outside to pee, read and respond to 4 emails, answer 9 text messages, open the door to one visitor, and prepare myself lunch and coffee. And this is a quiet day when I don’t have anything else going on. But each interruption takes me out of what I was working on, and causes me to completely lose the thread of what I was saying. So I apologize if I seem to run off the tracks periodically in this post. I really did have a point when I started.

Jenny Offill coined the phrase, “art monster,” to describe a character in a short story who doesn’t get married, who devotes herself entirely to her art, who wears her selfish devotion to her work as a badge of honor. I’m not going to delve too deep into the term, as greater minds than mine have written dozens of think-pieces about the notion (Rebecca Solnit being one). But I bring it up because I think the phrase does correctly identify that to be a great artist, one must work at the exclusion of pretty much everything else. (See: The four-burner theory). Allegedly Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella or lick his own stamps. And I guarantee you people are still going to be talking about Lolita in 500 years.

But I’m not Nabokov. I don’t have that kind of life. Most writers don’t. And that’s ok. But I think sometimes I don’t want to write because I know I won’t be able to conjure up that “silent grass-growing mood” as Melville so eloquently put it. If I can’t have all the time, my brain says, then I don’t want to spend any time.

I think about this when I think about the silences that exist between other writers’ books. How many silences are due to family, work, illness, money problems? And how many are due to the never ending volley of tasks lobbed at us on a daily basis? The “quick questions” and “tiny favors” and “do you minds” and “when you get a minutes” and “hey Moms” that pop up literally dozens of times a day.

I’ll finish my novel. I know I will. Eventually. But I want it to be done now because I have other things I want to do. But some days I’m just not able to carve out the time. When my life is over and reduced to a few lines on a Wikipedia page, I wonder how many entries I’ll have under the Bibliography section. How many years will have elapsed from one novel to another? What will people imagine I did in the spaces between?

If you’ve never read Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People, I highly recommend it. It was written following the premature death of Rabbi Kushner’s son, and it’s given millions of people solace during difficult times.

(Being a rabbi, Kushner writes about grief from a theistic perspective, so for the sake of this newsletter I’m going to speak from the position that God exists. The insights, however, apply regardless of faith or lack thereof.)

When someone loses a loved one, it’s customary, for some reason, for people to try to comfort the bereaved by saying that their loved one is in a better place, or that their death was part of God’s plan, or that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. Kushner rejects all of these claims with a proposition that makes a lot of sense to me.

God is typically assumed to be all-knowing (omniscience), all-loving (omnibenevolence), and all-powerful (omnipotence). However if God is all-loving, how can we explain the millions of horrible things that befall people everyday? And who could worship a God who they believe causes children to suffer and die of cancer? I read a memoir once by a woman who took care of her mother as she was slowly succumbing to dementia, and I remember that at one point someone tried to make her feel better by saying that God had given her mother dementia for reasons that were yet to be revealed. I’ll never forget what she said in response: “Then God is a monster.”

But, Kushner says, if we reject the notion that God is all-powerful, then we remove the possibility that God causes some to suffer unduly. If you’ve ever seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, they pose the question, “Could God microwave a burrito so hot that even God couldn’t eat it?” It’s a silly question, but it gets to the heart of something important: There are limits to God’s power.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Head Rabbi of the UK, was asked, Where was God during the Holocaust? And he responded by essentially asking, Where was man?

“When God speaks and human beings refuse to listen, even God is helpless in that situation.”

I actually find this comforting. I was never persuaded by the notion of Jesus taking the wheel. It makes more sense to me that it’s up to us to do the right thing, to take care of one another, to make good choices, to step up, to share and comfort and love and nurture without waiting for some celestial superman to drop in and save the day. Rejecting God’s omnipotence not only obviates the notion that God chooses some to suffer, but it also makes our actions that much more important and sacred. It means that sometimes bad things happen and it’s terrible. Why do they happen? Who knows? Would knowing the answer make them any less terrible? Not likely. When terrible things happen to us we must lean on our loved ones for support, and when they happen to someone else we must be their support. But everything we do matters.

I recently had the pleasure of contributing to Texas Highways Magazine, a fabulous monthly that highlights the best of my home state and encourages readers to find adventure and surprise in their own backyards.

My essay, “On Little Islands” is about celebrating Hanukkah in my hometown of Corpus Christi, and speaks about the symbolism of the candles driving out the darkness.

“We’re all connected. And our purpose on Earth is to illuminate the world with goodness and kindness.” He lights the shamash, or worker candle, which he uses to light the other candles in the menorah. As the flame catches and one fire becomes two, three, four, five, I think about how kindness can spread in the same way. One good deed inspires another and another, rekindling faith and love among friends, neighbors, family members, and strangers in a lonely and fractured world where it’s easy to ignore one another and sink into the isolation of a screen.

A few announcements:

The Bullet Swallower was selected by the Texas Institute of Letters as an honor-winner in the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction. It was selected by a panel of Texan writers and all people I very much admire, so I’m especially proud of this honor.

My book is available in Italian! And Spanish!

And finally, starting Thursday, I’m teaching an 8-week writing workshop that focuses on revisions. We only have a couple of spots left so sign up soon.

Be well out there!

xoxo,

Elizabeth

This year has already gotten off to a rocky start for many and I am not particularly optimistic that things will get better any time soon. So that’s why I want to talk a little bit about habits, resolutions, and best intentions.

I don’t always make New Year’s resolutions, but I really want to exercise more in 2025, so I resolved to do just that. And to that end I listened to The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. It was an interesting book on how habits form, are broken, and how they can work for or against us.

Essentially a habit consists of a trigger (I’m awake), a routine (I reach for my phone), and a reward (I have notifications!). The reward doesn’t even have to really be a reward (most of my notifications are junk) — it just has to be something we anticipate and then receive. So if you want to, for instance, stop drinking wine after work and exercise instead, you need to figure out what reward you want (ie, to unwind after work), find a trigger you can attach to that reward (coming home from work and picking up your Nintendo Switch instead of a glass of wine), and then the routine is following through with your exercise routine (playing Just Dance for 30 minutes).

Exercise isn’t the only habit I’ve been trying to acquire. I also want to eat healthier, read the books I bought 5 years ago and haven’t gotten around to reading, learn another language, spend more time with my family, spend more time outside, spend less time on emails and more time writing, use up my scrap yarn, get organized, spruce up the house, start making my own tortillas… You know, just like be an entirely different person who makes entirely different choices all day every day and gets around to doing every single thing she’s ever offhandedly said she wants to do.

But we can dream, right? We can enter every year, month, Monday morning with our best intentions and that’s ok. That’s enough. Because inevitably life will intervene and we’ll have to put off some of those goals or adjust our expectations or just realize that we’re constitutionally not exactly the person we see in our fantasies. I read recently that a painter never uses all their paint, and that made me feel better. Like we’re all going to die with unfinished plans and stuff we wanted to get around to and that’s fine. That’s the human condition.

I said that life will inevitably intervene and all our intentions and best laid plans will crumble between our fingertips. And that happens to me a lot, as it does with everyone. But I’ve noticed that, more often than not, I’m the one intervening, barging into my own life as it’s nicely humming along and adding complications and restrictions and stepping on my own feet and gumming up the works until everything that had been going smoothly is now all out of whack again.

Enter: The dog.

My son and I finally wore my husband down and last week we got a dog, an adorable French bulldog named Mr. Pickles. Now, I want to preface this story with 2 caveats: 1) I am notoriously bad at estimation. Any kind of estimation, whether it’s knowing how much salmon to buy for 8 adults, how much time it will take me to get ready for a party, or how much work is required to care for an 11-month-old dog. And 2) I have never really had a dog before. We had a dog when I was a kid, but owning a dog in Texas in the 80s-90s is not really comparable to owning a dog in Massachusetts in 2025. My family’s approach to dogs can best be summed up by the following George Lopez routine:

@georgelopezHow Latinos Get a Free Dog #latinos #latinoamerica #georgelopez #standup #fyp #foryoupage #funny #comedy #latinohumor #latinojokes #latinocomedy #fyp #foryou #viral #tiktok #fy #trending #funny

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Our dog lived outside, did her business outside, and our financial investment in her was limited to shampoo, flea collars, and a yearly vet checkup. But I am quickly learning that this is not the way people own dogs nowadays. As soon as I announced I was getting a dog, a dozen different friends asked me if I was getting pet insurance to which I responded…

And I’m also learning that living with Mr. Pickles is like living with a really strong toddler who won’t wear a diaper. In a week he’s pooped/peed on pretty much everything on the first floor of our house, terrified my cats, humped my neighbor’s leg, chewed through three door jambs, humped my daughter’s leg, eaten a dog bed, and proven that he is impervious to the tranquilizing effects of the drug, gabapentin.

Don’t get me wrong: he’s a lovely dog. He has a sweet personality and is generally a good boy. But he’s also an entire demon straight from hell and I really had no idea what I was getting into. We have an appointment with a dog trainer in a week and I’m hoping that after that Mr. Pickles will be (somewhat) civilized. But in the meantime we have to take him outside basically every hour, rub lime on our door jambs, play with him, tire him out, distract him, route the cats away from him (and route them away from my daughter’s room which is where they have decided they would prefer to go to the bathroom rather than their litter box), and keep him away from my neighbor’s leg. It’s exhausting. And instead of ascending into my zen cottagecore era, I’m spending hours cleaning carpets and throwing a tennis ball and carrying hissing cats up and down stairs.

And I did this. This was all me. I’m fully aware of that. I think knowing that these are the consequences of my actions coming back to slobber all over my hands (did I mention my husband and I are allergic to his saliva??) makes it easier to deal, as the only person I can resent is me. But finding the balance now between self care and family care and work and dog duty is all a bit much.

So if I miss the mark on my resolution I am preemptively absolving myself here, fourteen days into the year. And I absolve all of you, too, if you’re already realizing that your best intentions may have to wait a little while.

“Perfection is the enemy of the good.” (I’m pretty sure I got that from Karamo on Queer Eye.) It means that just because we can’t be perfect doesn’t mean we can’t be good. I might not run five miles today but I can walk the dog, I can play cards with my son, I can text a friend who’s going through it and then try to have salad with my dinner. It’s enough.

Blessings and peace for the new year.

xoxo

Upcoming stuff

• Paperbacks of The Bullet Swallower go on sale 1/21! You can preorder them here.

• 2/1/25 - I’ll be in Bridgeport, CT at Black Rock Books in conversation with Christine Kandic Torres in collaboration with Fairfield County Story Lab. Event starts at 5:30pm. Please RSVP here.

• 2/2/25 - I’ll be at Trillium Brewery in Canton, MA from 2-4pm for a book and beer tasting sponsored by Hygge House Books. I’ll be joined by NYTimes bestselling horror author Paul Tremblay and nationally bestselling author Marjan Kamali for a really fun event where you’ll sample some beer, sample some books, and hopefully find a few really great reads. Not a bad way to spend Groundhog Day! Tickets are $35 and include beer and $10 off a book of your choice. More info here.

• 2/6/25 - I am honored to be a guest of Texas A&M International University in Laredo, TX (my hometown until I was 10) and Texas Humanities. At 6:30pm I’ll be at the Villa Antigua Border Museum giving a talk and a reading about the US/Mexico border and how I represented it in The Bullet Swallower. This is a really meaningful one for me since it is my hometown. If you’re in the area please come by and say hello!

Stay safe out there <3

I still haven’t quite found the right metaphor to describe the difference between novel writing and screenplay writing — is it like learning Spanish and then learning Portuguese? In that you think they’re closer than they actually are? Is it less like writing and more like architecture? Making sure the structure has a solid foundation, load-bearing walls, a tasteful amount of ornamentation?

The one I’ve settled on recently is that I feel like an interior designer — hired for my expertise and vision, but ultimately working with (for?) the client (and their money) to achieve a final product that’s satisfying to everyone. It’s so radically different to novel writing that I’m tempted to say having skills in one doesn’t mean beans to the other. Though there have been an elite few (Emma Donoghue, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Aldous Huxley among them) who were able to toggle between both.

The adaptation is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, professionally or otherwise. The process is: I turn in pages, the producers send me notes (things they don’t understand, questions about the rules of the story universe, suggested edits, etc.), I revise according to their notes, and then get more notes in response. And repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. Apparently there’s no such thing as a perfect (or even finished) script. I heard that producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, on seeing Pretty Woman the day before its public release, apparently saw enough wrong with the film that he gave the writer 15 pages of notes.

This is no job for someone with thin skin or a fragile ego. I’ve had to remind myself on a daily basis that a) I asked for this and b) this is just what the job is, so if I don’t like it I can choose to never do it again.

And yet I do like it. And I plan to do it many more times again in the future (God willing). I guess I like suffering. Or maybe I’m just blinded by the bright lights of Hollywood. But I can accept the terms of the gig, as ego-bruising as they are.

And speaking of a bruised ego, I want to share two very unflattering stories about me, both because I have no filter and tend to overshare, and because I appreciate it when people publicly cop to their flaws and try to grow from them. None of us are perfect, we’re all going to miss the mark, but our mistakes can turn into something really meaningful if we use them to be better.

Confession #1: I am an inveterate gossip.

Literally my senior quote in my high school yearbook was, “If you can’t say something nice about someone, come sit by me.” I’ve gotten in trouble So. Many. Times. for gossiping that you’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. And I have tried to be better. I don’t gossip in my professional circles because I don’t want to start trouble, and because I don’t want to limit my career or get a reputation for being a crappy person. So I keep my trap shut and pour all of my observations and judgements and hearsay into my fiction writing (heavily, HEAVILY disguised of course).

So since I don’t allow myself to gossip (much) about other writers, that means I keep my gossip relegated to friends, neighbors, family members, or observations about celebrities and public figures (ask me about the Karen Read trial if you want to get sucked into an hour of conspiracy theories and stuff I overheard at Pilates).

I recently put my foot so far into my mouth at a party that I’m pretty sure my toes were poking out of my ears. I related a piece of gossip about someone without knowing that person was within earshot and when I realized my mistake, dear reader, please know that I stood there and watched my soul fly right out of my body.

Obviously I apologized profusely and with much colorful language directed at myself. I even sent the offended party an email the next day reiterating my apology, which was graciously accepted, and everything is now water under the bridge. But I still feel like an absolute jackass, and I am very tired of my dumb mouth still getting me in trouble, even at 42 years old.

Why are we compelled to badmouth other people? For one thing, I think it cements in-group/out-group status. If I make a disparaging remark about X, I mark myself as not-X, as well as everyone who hears my remark. We now share a secret — that we think poorly of X — thus creating a bond between us predicated on excluding X. Gossip and shit-talking are also human nature. It’s a part of human nature we can transcend of course, but a lot of us seem hard-wired to want to spread information tinged with our (often shitty) opinions.

Judaism has a lot to say about gossiping. Lashon hara — literally, evil speech or evil tongue — is a very serious sin. Serious in that, once out, words can’t be put back in someone’s mouth, and serious in that the person committing lashon hara also causes the listener to sin, since they’ve now heard the gossip and can’t un-hear it. Literally every Saturday we say a prayer in Temple that begs God to “guard my tongue from evil.”

(I will add though that gossip can be beneficial sometimes. Whisper networks have protected women from sexual predators in the workplace. I even heard novelist Angie Cruz say at a lecture once that “chisme (gossip) is care.” If you think of a community of immigrants living in one little pocket of a strange new city, gossip is how you pass critical information. It’s how you avoid cops, keep your kids out of trouble, help your neighbor who’s being beaten by her husband. But I’m not talking about this positive form of chisme — I just wanted to acknowledge that it exists.)

I recently heard someone say this about lashon hara: How long does it take to build a house? Like a year? And how long does it take to tear down a house? Like ten minutes with the right equipment? It’s easier to destroy than build up. If positive speech builds people up, then negative speech tears them down. And I don’t want to be responsible for tearing people down, especially with how much negativity there is in the world already.

Confession #2: I can hold a grudge.

I’m not special in this regard. A lot of people hold grudges. But unless the grudge is based on something serious, like your best friend sleeping with your fiancee, or your dumbass cousin forgetting to feed your cat while you were out of town and causing the poor thing to claw its way to freedom through an air vent and disappear into the woods (I swear this never happened to me!), then you can probably let it go. Life is short. People screw up. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.

Seven years ago I got into a disagreement with a good friend. It seemed really major at the time, and we didn’t speak afterwards. For seven years! That’s one-sixth of my life! I knew I was going to see her at an event in November, and I was really worried because I imagined things were going to be super awkward between us. I assumed she hated me, and had been bad-mouthing me to everyone she knew for the last 7 years — an assumption entirely rooted in my own shame over our disagreement rather than anything to do with her.

The argument started over a misunderstanding, and was exacerbated by my own inability to deal well with conflict. I don’t do conflict.

I will twist myself up into a pretzel to avoid conflict. I always have. It’s crazy that at one point I was seriously considering a career in law, lol.

So in the run-up to the party, as I worried more and more about how I would deal with this uncomfortable situation, I went back over the details of the argument and realized that 1) not only was I just as much at fault as she was, but 2) I’d acted like an entire dickhead. I’d been sitting there for 7 years believing that I had a right to my grudge, when I most certainly did not, and had caused myself and my friend a lot of pain and trouble in the process.

We saw each other at the event, and after a little bit of uncomfortable chatting and catch-up, I screwed up my courage and pulled her aside and apologized. And she was so kind and gracious, and said she missed being friends, and we made up! After all those years we had a really great time hanging out, just like old times. Suddenly the argument felt so foolish, so self-created, so unnecessary.

Shame is a really easy emotion to fall back on. I feel shame for so many stupid things I’ve said in the past, so many times when I could have been better but wasn’t. But shame isn’t a particularly helpful emotion because it focuses solely on you and doesn’t extend outward into the world. And shame is often coupled with embarrassment, so instead of prodding you to ask for forgiveness and make amends, it actually encourages you to withdraw and hide.

This is one of the reasons my friend and I didn’t speak for 7 years — because after I got over my anger, I was ashamed for how I’d behaved, but couldn’t get over my embarrassment and therefore make amends. If we hadn’t found ourselves at the same event last month, who knows how long I would have gone before apologizing??

There’s a big difference between shame and regret. Regret acknowledges: I made a mistake. Shame is internalized as: I AM a mistake. One encourages action, one encourages hiding. And how can we ever grow and become better people if we run and hide every time we make a mistake?

I’ve been called out publicly on more than one occasion when I’ve screwed up, and, without getting too woo-woo, I’ve learned to recognize these people as angels in the world.

Seriously, what better gift can we get than someone looking out for us and forcing us into difficult periods of growth and maturity? Yeah it’s uncomfortable, but it’s the only way to be better, and the only way to make our shitty behavior mean anything.

So I’ll end on a positive note: I wish for all of you that you never screw up. But when you inevitably do, I hope that someone kindly pulls you aside and lets you know. And I wish for all of you that when your screw ups are pointed out, that you can move from shame into regret, from feeling into action, from tearing down into building up.

In case you missed it:

I was on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Check This Out with Rachel Barenbaum

Thanks everyone who voted for The Bullet Swallower in Goodreads’ Choice Awards!

I’ve been telling people for years that I am the voice of a generation and MSNBC finally listened when they featured me on their documentary My Generation, as a representative of the (geriatric) Millennials (I come in at about 1 hour 26 minutes)

The Bullet Swallower was spotted in the background of episode 2 of Nobody Wants This, Netflix’s smash comedy hit starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody

I have a short story in 2024’s Short Story Advent Calendar, still available for purchase

The Bullet Swallower was named a Best Book of 2024 by NPR, CrimeReads, Washington Independent Review of Books, and others. Thank you for all the love!

And I am still booking editing clients — I can read a full fiction manuscript, a short story, or even a query letter. Email author@elizabethgonzalezjames.com for more info.

Good night and God bless,

Elizabeth

I’m late to do all the things I’d meant to do this month because 1) everyone in my family came down with bacterial pneumonia including me, and recovery took a long time, 2) we experienced two deaths on my father’s side of the family, both somewhat unexpected, and I had to fly to Texas and help out, and then also take time to grieve myself, and 3) it seems to take me longer and longer to get back into the swing of things after an interruption like travel or illness, and since my life these days is interrupted with one or the other about every 2 weeks, I feel like I’m losing weeks and weeks just trying to play catch up.

Of course I know to cut myself some slack, but at the same time I have stuff I need to do, and losing days or weeks at a time makes me feel stressed, which somehow causes me to procrastinate even more, until everything backs up like train cars and my whole life feels derailed. I think we all want to feel like we’re being pro-active rather than re-active, anticipating things rather than endlessly responding to emergencies, and yet sometimes the latter becomes a loop we can’t break out of.

Now I don’t know how you handle stress, but my methods tend to involve some combination of ice cream and wine, french fries, whiskey, brownies, third helpings of spaghetti and meatballs, saying yes to whipped cream, yes let’s make it a large, add guac and cheese, just one more drink before bed, one more bite, and another and another and and and…

Being a woman, I have a lot of issues with my weight. I absorbed all of the fat-phobic messaging of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, devoured fashion magazines promoting heroin chic and models with figures like teenage boys, and grew up idolizing Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, Jane Birkin and Jackie Kennedy, Madonna and Salma Hayek and Elizabeth Hurley - all very, very petite women.

I’ve always had issues with my weight, despite that I’ve never really been overweight. However I have felt overweight since the 5th grade, and have been scheming ways to diet and slim down for over thirty years.

Thirty. Years. For over thirty years I have woken up every day and worried about what I was going to eat, whether I should skip breakfast or lunch (or both), counted calories, tried to think about ways to feel full without eating, only to get a few hours into my day, face the fact that I am ravenous by 10am, and proceed to eat (and on many days, overeat) until I go to bed guilt-ridden and ashamed, vowing to do better the next day, and so on, and so on. I think it’s possible I have issues with my weight precisely because I’ve never been overweight (a circumstance that likely has as much to do with luck and genetics as anything), as it is this terror that keeps me locked in this perpetual cycle of fear and shame and eating and disordered thinking.

And just to make clear - there’s nothing wrong with being overweight. I am so happy that the phrase “body positivity” has entered our vocabulary. I’m thrilled my kids are growing up at a time when stores feature models of different sizes and body types. And it’s well past time that fat-shaming is getting called out and renounced.

Nor am I unaware of the very real struggles that overweight people face in a hostile world that often hates and demeans their bodies. I read the memoirs Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Hunger by Roxane Gay, each detailing the author’s struggle with being visibly overweight, and the kind of unrelenting scrutiny and ridicule visited upon them as they simply try to go about their day. I am not comparing my experience with theirs, as I’m very cognizant of the privilege I have of being a person whose body is largely accommodated in the world of airplanes and restaurants and clothing stores. I am simply saying that I’m not immune to the toxic messaging around weight, and have been making myself miserable because of it since before I even experienced puberty.

During the early days of the quarantine in 2020, many of us hunkered down with junk food, using it as a palliative against the uncertainty of the pandemic, the stress of having children out of school, and the economic terror of an entire planet on lockdown. I gained five pounds that spring, and then gained another five when we moved across the country a year later.

I have enjoyed enormous success in my career in the last 3 years. But along with this success has come a tremendous amount of work, travel, commitments involving multiple concurrent projects, major life events both good and bad, health scares, and undertaking entirely new challenges requiring me to learn things quickly and perform at an elite level pretty much from the outset. When I was hired to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Bullet Swallower my husband said it was like jumping from junior varsity to starting in the NBA — when someone passes you the ball you’d better hope you know what to do, or you’re going to look like a damn fool.

All of this stress caused me to gain another five or so pounds, at which point I noticed that my clothes no longer fit. And suddenly my fears about my weight were no longer abstract. They were, in my mind, entirely justified.

I’m 42 years old. For a long time I could tell myself I was still young and that my face didn’t yet show its age, but I’m now starting to get called “ma’am” by young men, and I’ve realized I can actually hurt myself by stretching behind me to get something out of the backseat when I’m in the car. My husband has kindly told me that I might fall over an “aging cliff” at the age of 44, wherein researchers say most people experience a rapid decline in their abilities in a short amount of time. I’m starting to feel torn between a nagging suspicion that I ought to “dress my age” and a frantic desire to cling to short hems and plunging necklines and neon colors like they’re the last lifeboats on the Titanic.

I’ve reached an age where it’s notoriously difficult to lose weight, as the body stubbornly holds onto its pre-menopausal fat stores in case of pregnancy, famine, robot apocalypse, whatever. I’ve been trying to lose a few pounds since 2021 and have only managed to put on more weight and make myself angry and more ashamed. I’m angry because I cannot control my body in a way that I could in my 30s, and I’m ashamed because of how fixated I am on an issue that is, objectively, stupid and irrelevant. No one cares about my weight except me. No one is asking me to lose this weight, nor am I receiving negative feedback from anyone except myself. This is an issue only to me, perpetuated only by me, and, ironically, solve-able only by me. I am, as always, the sole agent of my own undoing.

I suspect part of my fixation with my weight has to do with the fact that I am aging, and therefore losing status in society as an object of men’s sexual desire. Not that I was ever any kind of pinup model, but in our society, many of us were brought up to believe (and still subconsciously, stubbornly believe) that our value as women derives in large part from our ability to sexually excite men. It’s why the entire concept of the male gaze was invented.

Because a lot of us are still trying to be sexy and attractive in order to preserve status, elicit admiration for the benefit of our own egos, and conform in a society that rigidly upholds cis-gender femininity as the standard of beauty. It’s retrograde and unfair and harmful and gross and I can’t break out of it and doubt that I ever will.

So here I come back to my problem. I have put on weight. I want to lose the weight. I can’t lose the weight. I feel bad because I feel I should lose the weight. Both to satisfy my own ego and fear of becoming overweight, as well as to satisfy a patriarchal notion that I only have value as a human in so far as I’m attractive. I realize the lunacy in this and feel bad about wanting to lose the weight. And yet I still want to lose the weight.

I don’t really have a conclusion to this. I want to wrap this up and say, “And then I realized blah blah blah and learned to love myself and yada yada yada…” But I didn’t. I’m still in this hamster wheel of fear and loathing and self recrimination. As far as I see it, I’ll get out either by losing the weight or finally accepting my body, and neither seems likely at the moment. So much of modern life is lived inside contradictions.

I don’t have any plans this Friday night. Maybe I can finally get a PSL and take my family to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I’ve heard it’s really good. And a big bucket of buttered popcorn sounds heavenly.

In case you missed it:

I interviewed Nicolás Medina Mora about his Bolaño-esque debut novel America del Norte

I’m coming to Saratoga Springs, NY this weekend!

And I’ll be in Austin for the Texas Book Fest in November!

Fox News (yes, Fox News) recommended my book as a great read for Hispanic Heritage Month. Muchas gracias Fox!

xoxo,

Elizabeth

That’s not to say the summer’s been all toil and trouble. There was a bit of this:

And a bit of this:

If you ever get the opportunity to lie in a hammock that is suspended above a swimming pool whilst simultaneously enjoying a cold beverage, it is so choice. I highly recommend it.

I also highly recommend Appropriate, the Tony award-winning play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and starring Sarah Paulson. I believe the last play I saw was a community playhouse production of Mid-Summer Night’s Dream when I was in the 8th grade, so my experience with live theater is sadly nonexistent. But this show was remarkable. It’s about a dysfunctional family tasked with cleaning out their' deceased patriarch’s plantation home, and uncovering some very ugly truths in the process. And for a play about horrible secrets, it was hilarious. The audience was howling - with both laughter and horror. I actually shouted, “Oh my God!” at one point, and I do not believe I have ever spoken aloud to any performance ever.

It was incredible to be in the theater watching people react to the story in real time, and to be swept along in the experience myself, along with a roomful of strangers. Reading is a very solitary pastime. So is writing. I never see my readers gasping or giggling or holding on to the edge of their seats while they’re reading one of my books. Even watching a movie in a theater — if you happen to go during a particularly full showtime — isn’t quite the same experience. There’s something very passive about watching a movie, whereas a live performance seems to allow more crowd participation. I can see how, as an actor or playwright, the experience would become addictive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about plays lately. Screenplays and plays have some foundational aspects in common — they’re visual, dialogue-driven, usually consist of three acts. And I’ve been fortunate enough to have recently joined a workshop group made up of primarily playwrights and screenwriters, directors and actors. Their approach to storytelling is so different to mine, and it’s been utterly fascinating to read their work. And to see the delicious risks they take in their stories.

Literary fiction — what I write — has long been mired in a pointless and protracted battle with genre fiction — a category that includes sci-fi, horror, fantasy, romance, thriller. Much ink has been spilled about whether a particular book is literary or genre, which type of book is superior, whether publishers or readers want to see more of one or less of the other. It’s very boring.

But being aware of the debate, and being aware of the sort of lesser-than stigma attached to being labeled a “genre writer,” I have hesitated to let my writing get too weird. (And I realize this is rich coming from the person who wrote an entire short story about a planet where all the inhabitants look like John Slattery.)

But I do struggle sometimes with finding the courage to be weird and to take risks with my stories. When the books that are critical darlings tend to be sparse, realist, quiet, and (sorry, not sorry) plotless, I question my taste level sometimes if what I want to write are sprawling, messy, florid, time-hopping disasters of form. In the quiet words of Joan Collins: Am I too much?

Enter my new friends, the playwrights. Their work is beautiful, surreal, dirty, littered with oblique pop cultural references, nonsensical, and glorious. It makes me so happy when I read something and I have no bloody idea what could possibly happen next. I wonder if the live performance aspect of theater demands writing with a big personality, if only to be heard all the way at the back of the second balcony. And I wonder if plays, unlike novels, have a “springiness’ to them, since the lines could conceivably be altered night by night, the audience scarcely the wiser.

I discovered Charli XCX’s new album, Brat, the way many of us in our 40s did: We clicked on an article explaining why Kamala Harris’s online promos are lime green. Being a pretty cool bean myself, I listened to the album and really enjoyed it, and have embraced the whole “brat summer” ethos, which seems to mainly consist of doing what you want and not washing your hair. “I went my own way and I made it…That city sewer slut's the vibe.”

I’m in favor of more of us doing what we want more and washing our hair less. Taking risks and being weird and being too much and just. Doing. The. Thing.

May this be the summer we all get weird. Cheers, you blessed freaks.

New stuff:

I’m super excited to be appearing at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC on August 24th. Here’s a nice writeup about it.

I’ll be at the Saratoga Book Festival October 6th.

And the Texas Book Festival in Austin November 16 and 17th.

I’m teaching Getting Stated in Essay Writing on August 31st (online) and Writing Strong Voice in Fiction on December 7th (also online).

I reviewed Bret Anthony Johnston’s new novel We Burn Daylight

I also reviewed Alex Espinoza’s new novel, The Sons of El Rey

The Bullet Swallower was named one of Esquire’s best books of 2024, one of Crime Read’s best historical novels of the year, and Goodreads featured it in a number of lovely lists including Journey Through the Ages with 48 New Historical Fiction Books, A Reading Roadtrip Across the U.S.A., Recent Reader Favorite Contemporary & Historical Fiction Hits, Hot & New: 81 Very Recent Hit Books, and A Guide to Second Novels that Nail the 'Sophomore Surge'.

xoxo,

Elizabeth

So I have a small favor to ask: Please vote for The Bullet Swallower. You can vote up to 10 times until Thursday night at 11:30pm EST. And thank you so much for your support!!

I want to talk about multitasking. It's a thing that most everyone claims to be able to do, and a thing that most employers claim to want. But I wanted to talk about how perilous I think multitasking can be in general, and for writers especially.

Taken in its most charitable light, multitasking describes an ability not just to do several things at once, but to shift focus when you’re interrupted, manage the interruption, and then easily go back to the primary task(s). I was a waitress for many years, and multitasking is crucial for that particular job. You need to simultaneously greet new guests, take orders, carry food, remind the busboy to clean up the spill at Table 14, remember the ketchup for Table 6, carry iced teas, brew more iced tea, remind the busboy again about the spill, manage the new girl who can’t remember which tables are hers, greet even newer guests, answer the phone, carry food, take orders, remember the side of salsa for Table 5…. you get the picture. For some professions, multitasking is necessary. An air traffic controller who can’t focus on several things at once would be a disaster.

But what about other types of jobs? Should we require that program managers and paralegals and welders and data analysts and carpenters juggle a bunch of different tasks while being constantly interrupted? Or should we rather encourage a work environment where people are able to say, Please let me finish what I’m working on and don’t bother me until I give you the thumbs up? Or, Please let me finish my current project before asking me to take on another? I know - a girl can dream.

But as I’m self employed and set my own schedule, I have the rare privilege of being able to decide if I work on one project at a time or several. And I often wonder if as a writer, I ought to be multitasking.

Is it better for us to be monogamous with our work, exclusive to one special project, or have several projects going at once, stringing along a bunch of potentials and enjoying the polyamory of skipping from one to another?

Alice Hoffman is an extraordinarily prolific writer who has published one book about every year or two since the late 1970s. When once asked how she can write so many books, she said her secret is that she’s always writing two books at once. When she gets stuck on one, she switches to the other and writes until she gets stuck. Et voila: A forty year career.

This seems insane to me. How can a writer do the work of creating a believable fictional world, populated with believable fictional people, drop herself in, get fully immersed in the project, and then pull stakes and drop down into an entirely different fictional world populated with entirely different fictional people? The whiplash of switching from one to the other sounds disastrous to me. Every time I toggled between projects I think I’d lose an entire day just trying to reorient myself: Ok, who are these people again? And why is Diane crying in the corner?

I can see the value, however, in working on a novel and short stories or essays at the same time. I can envision a world where I’m working on a novel where the main character is dealing with intense loneliness, say, and I have an idea for a way this loneliness could manifest, but I don’t think it would fit very well into the story I’m trying to tell. So maybe I write a short story and try it out over there.

But even still it feels a bit like cheating.

I liken multitasking when writing to cheating because I do find some strange parallels between writing and dating:

There’s a flirtation with a new idea (What if this crazy dude had it out for a whale?), a courtship (Do I really want to write a whole novel about hunting whales?), a honeymoon period (Omg, whales are the most fascinating subject on earth!), a realization of the imperfections inherent to your project (This idea was dumb. No one wants to read 500 pages of whale facts), a doubling down on your commitment because you realize you truly do believe in the project (Readership be damned, I love whales so effing much), consummation (Hooray - it’s a book!), and finally, the horrible/wonderful realization that the project is over, the relationship has run its course, and it’s now time to move onto a new idea (Whales were a bit too concrete. What if I wrote a novel about ambiguity?)

As I’ve been adapting The Bullet Swallower for the screen, I find that I’m growing tired of being in this story world, a place I’ve inhabited now for 9 years. It feels a bit like a stale relationship. You want to break up but your friends keep telling you you’re such a cute couple, and so you tell yourself you’ll stay together for the prom photos, graduation at the latest, and dump him the first day of summer vacation.

But I’m close to being done with the script and I’m getting ready to settle into a new project. But which one? I have 40 pages of a new novel started, middling first drafts of 4 or 5 short stories, solid ideas for 7 other novels or short story collections, and 4 or 5 ideas for screenplays or plays. My imagination cup runneth over.

Do I jump straight into a new long-term relationship with a new novel? Or do I play the field for a while with some short stories - low commitment hookups that could last a week or a month, depending? Or do I try multitasking, the open marriage of work styles? Could I juggle relationships with two projects at once? Is it folly to believe my heart and mind could be so divided? And by splitting myself between two major projects, would I be giving each one short shrift, foreclosing true intimacy, true connection with a new novel because I’d always have a foot planted in some other world?

This has been on my mind lately because someone recently suggested that I might crave the validation of finishing projects, that I can actually get addicted to the brief high of seeing a job completed.

This was mind-blowing to me, and seemed deadly accurate. In addition to writing I frequently have 5 or 6 knitting and crochet projects going at any given time. And I’m always halfway through reading several books. I load myself up with projects, as many as I can dream up. I have so much creativity, and so much desire to channel it, that it sometimes feels oppressive, like I’ll never live long enough to get everything done. That this could all be some scheme my brain cooked up in order to get a dopamine hit off of knitting another sweater or scratching another novel off my TBR list, makes a lot of sense. My brain is wily. And I need a lot of validation.

Despite my possible addiction to completing tasks, and despite the desire to get the quick fix of writing a brief little thing and knowing it’s done, I think in the end I’m just a long-term monogamy-type gal. I think it’s hard to find an idea that really gets your blood pumping, that makes you want to get out of bed and get back to work, so that when I find a good one, my inclination is to latch on and lock it down. Ride it through. Stick with it when things inevitably get rough. And oh, they will.

I may not ever publish as many books as Alice Hoffman, but I will love with my whole heart every book that I write. And that feels like enough.

xoxo,

Elizabeth

I don’t have space to say anything else this month, lol, other than that I’m so incredibly grateful for all the love and support I received throughout my book launch. It’s easy to feel devastated by all the awful things happening in the world, but there is so much goodness in the world, too. And I received more than my share in the last 2 months. Thank you, everyone, for everything.

xoxo,

Elizabeth

PS: I have a few events still to come:

• I’m teaching Getting Started in Personal Essay Writing 3/16 in-person at Grub Street

• I’m speaking at the Sharon Public Library on 3/21 in Sharon, MA

• I’m speaking with Rachel Lyon about her novel Fruit of the Dead on 3/29 in Cambridge

• I’ll be speaking with Ursula Villareal Moura about her debut novel Like Happiness on 4/2 in Cambridge

• I’ll be speaking at the San Antonio Book Festival, 4/13 in San Antonio

• I’m participating in 3 events at Muse & the Marketplace, 5/10-12 in Boston

• And I’m speaking with Ananda Lima about her new short story collection, Craft Stories I Wrote for the Devil on 6/19 in Boston

First a few nice things to share:

• The Boston Globe calls The Bullet Swallower “a novel of mesmerizing scope and ambition”

• DailyKOs said it was “an audaciously told novel with an ending that is a full-hearted display of what happens with people care about others, and the value of a family legacy that united generations.”

• I was interviewed in The Boston Globe about my long and torturous path to becoming a writer

• The Bullet Swallower is a “Best of the Month” according to Kobo

• HipLatina names TBS one of 20 Books by Latinx Authors Coming Out in 2024 You Need to Read

• CrimeReads named it one of the most anticipated crime fiction books of 2024

• It received a starred review from BookPage!

• And supposedly the book will be in the 1/29 print issue of People Magazine but I haven’t been able to get a copy so if you have one please take a photo of it and send it to me!

  ---

The book comes out on Tuesday. As I shared in my last newsletter this moment has been a long, long time coming. And now that it’s here the panic is rising. It’s exciting to publish a book, but it’s also scary. You’re putting your whole heart and soul into something that’s going out into the world where people will judge it. In fact, you’re hoping that people judge it — reviews are what bring the arts into the public forum. My stomach is in knots right now hoping that people review the book, and that they enjoy it, even as I dread what they might say.

But my anxiety over reviews is also a little ironic because I don’t read reviews. At all. None of them.

I remember reading that the actress, Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones), never Googles herself to see what people are saying about her. She said something like, “If one person says I’m a stupid bitch, my brain will go, ‘Well, you’re a stupid bitch,’ and that’ll be the end of that.” Conan O’Brian also never reads his reviews. He said once on his podcast that he will never remember the good ones and will only fixate on the bad ones, and so it’s better to just avoid them altogether.

So I decided a long time ago, before my first book ever came out, that I wouldn’t read my reviews. Not the good ones, and not the bad ones. Like Conan, I know I won’t remember any of the lovely things people say about my work. I will only fixate on the one person who said my characters were flat, or my book was boring. And I don’t need that noise in my head. I have enough trouble silencing my own inner critic.

Most people have an inner critic (though maybe not the people who have no inner monologue, a discovery that I still haven’t recovered from). But while an inner critic might be helpful (maybe she encourages you to brush your hair before you leave the house, or talks you out of buying yet another outfit for your dog), in my case my inner critic is a bully who seems to exist to torture me.

Sort of like in IT when Pennywise is able to manifest as a person’s worst fears (like being a fanged clown isn’t frightening enough), my inner critic can shapeshift, moving from telling me my writing isn’t good to telling me not to eat dessert. It can turn good moments into bad ones, transforming a sense of satisfaction after turning in a draft into a sense of dread and shame that the work isn’t any good.

I’ve been thinking about all this as I’ve been adapting The Bullet Swallower for film, something I’ve dreamed about doing since the moment I typed the first line of the novel into a Word document. I’ve never written a screenplay before, and, while I knew the process would be hard, I didn’t know how hard it would be. I recently joked to a friend that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done including raising children, and while this is (mostly) an exaggeration, there’s something that feels insurmountable about writing a good script. I’m really doubting that I can do it. That maybe I just don’t have the chops. And it’s hard to distinguish how much of this doubt comes from my inner critic, and how much is an honest appraisal of my current abilities.

Trying something new involves some amount of delusion. If I sign up to run a marathon, I have to believe I can do it, even if I’ve never run a mile. And I have to keep on believing I can do it even when I get cramps and side stitches and it takes me a year to get into shape. I have to show up every day believing that I have the ability. Because if I doubt myself, I won’t be able to stick it out when things get tough.

A magical thing happens when we believe in ourselves, too. If our belief is paired with effort, our beliefs and our abilities will eventually align. We will find that after months of training we have become a person who can complete a marathon. And that is an incredible feeling — to see yourself become the person you believed you were. But the only way to do this is to silence your inner critic. Get out of your own way. Have delusional beliefs in your own abilities. And stay out of your own way.

I have realized that I am my own worst enemy. That no one else ever holds me back except me. I think conquering my own self doubt is going to be the project of my life for the foreseeable future. But it’s not insurmountable. I probably just have to believe that I can do it.

Blessings to you all and I hope I will see you at a book event in the next few weeks!

xoxo

Elizabeth

Greetings beloved friends,

I write to you from my bed where I am doing my annual convalescence after picking up another terrible New Years cold. Hopefully you’re all out in the world grabbing 2024 by its dragon horns, and not limping in stuffy-headed and overdosed on cough drops like I am. But I am grateful to be back home in my warm bed. I am thankful for Steely Dan, which has been on repeat at my bedside, and I am most thankful for the very warm response The Bullet Swallower is getting, even three weeks before it comes out. Here are some of the beautiful things people are saying:

• “A vivid epic” — Publishers Weekly

• “Mesmerizing and important” — Kirkus Reviews

• “A rich, sparkling novel” — Kelli Jo Ford, author of Crooked Hallelujah

• “An inventive tour-de-force” — Katie Gutierrez, author of More Than You'll Ever Know

• “Brutal in all the best ways” — Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Don't Say We Didn't Warn You

• “A phantasmagoric guisado of a novel” — Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo

• “One Hundred Years of Solitude meets Lonesome Dove” — Mary Pauline Lowry, author of The Roxy Letters

Garden & Gun called it a “can’t miss Mexican thriller” and it’s been added to Most Anticipated lists from Washington Post, Goodreads, StyleCaster, Sunset, The Nerd Daily, The Mary Sue, Kirkus, Read Between the Spines, and The Everygirl!

If you prefer to listen to your books, Audio Editions has a preview of the audiobook read by the amazing, Lee Osorio.

Poets & Writers was kind enough to feature the book in their Page One section - Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin. There’s even a clip of me reading the first page.

And yesterday Book of the Month revealed that The Bullet Swallower is one of their picks for January! Many, many thanks to BOTM.

Whew! I am so glad my weird book about heaven and hell and gold and gunfights is resonating with so many people. It’s been a long journey. How long, you ask?

No it hasn’t literally been 84 years, but it feels like it. Here’s a little timeline:

• 2013 - I have the idea for the book but can’t work on it because I’m working on Mona at Sea

• 2015 - I finish Mona at Sea and start researching The Bullet Swallower

• 2016, August - I start writing the rough draft

• 2019, March - After several attempts at a rough draft, and hundreds of pages of discarded material, I re-outline the entire book and try once again. (The outline is 22 pages single spaced)

• 2019, December - After 3 years I finally have a rough draft

• 2021, March - The Bullet Swallower is revised and ready to send to agents

• 2021, May - I sign with my amazing agent, Peter Steinberg

• 2021, December - After 6 months of rewrites and major revisions Peter says he wants me to scrap 50% of the book. I grudgingly agree (it was the right call)

• 2022, January - Peter sends the book to editors, and it’s acquired in 4 days by Tim O’Connell of Simon & Schuster

• 2022, March - We sell the film rights with me attached as screenwriter

• 2022, October - Tim and I finish edits on the book and it’s moved into the publication pipeline

• 2023, February - I get the go-ahead from the producers to start the screenplay

• 2023, May - The screenwriters guild (of which I am now a member) goes on strike

• 2023, October - Once the strike is over I finish the first draft of the screenplay and turn it in

• 2024, January - The book is launched

• 2024, 2025, 2026….? Hopefully the movie goes forward

So you can see that even answering the question of how long it took me to write this book is complicated. It depends on which metric I use. And as I’m still mired in screenplay revisions, I’m not done with it yet. Not the story, anyway. It’s hard for me to remember a time when this book wasn’t consuming all of my creative energy. And that’s a blessing. But it’s also a long time to devote to one story. So it feels like I’ve been telling this story for 84 years. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I actually will get to talk about this book for 84 years, “when men are fairy tales, and books are written by rabbits.”

Which brings me to….book tour time! I am so, so excited to finally get out from behind my desk, comb my hair, put on real clothes (assuming they still fit) and hit the road. I’m coming to Cambridge, Brooklyn, Waco, Dallas, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Corte Madera, Kansas City, Rhode Island, and The Berkshires.

Other events will likely be added, but this is what’s scheduled for now. If you live in or near any of these cities please come out and say hi. And if seeing my beautiful face isn’t enough of an enticement, I will make sure there is champagne and/or cookies at each event. You know I’m not gonna let y’all go hungry/sober.

It’s time for my next dose of Mucinex so that’s it for now. I will conclude with a few books I’ve read/am reading, and which I think are fantastic.

I have a review of this book forthcoming in LA Review of Books. It’s delightfully weird and takes place on the day Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes meets Emperor Moctezuma, setting the stage for centuries of colonialism and mess. Preorder here.

Currently halfway through this absolute blockbuster and loving it. Cecily is a Malaysian housewife who becomes a spy for the Japanese during their occupation of Malaysia in the 1930s-40s. You’re going to be hearing about this one a lot. Order here.

And yeah, you know I’m over here in my sickbed reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine. I think it’s the world’s first memoir? (Don’t quote me on that). It follows Saint Augustine from boyhood to sainthood in the 4th century and asks a lot of big questions like, Is there anything God can’t do? And, Why do they spank children so much in school? Order here or read it for free.

xoxo,

Elizabeth

I am so happy to share that The Bullet Swallower received starred reviews in Library Journal and Kirkus, with the latter calling it “mesmerizing and important.” Y’all - I drank so much champagne the night I read the review, I still have a headache.

My book tour is being put together as we speak, and as soon as I have dates and locations, you fine people will be the first to know. Ever since the writers strike ended I’ve been busy working on my very first screenplay because yes…The Bullet Swallower is in development as a feature film! I can’t say anything else, and of course in Hollywood nothing is certain until it’s certain, but it’s been a really amazing experience to get to adapt my novel to this different format. I think it must be like learning Spanish and then learning Portuguese….on the surface a book and a screenplay are similar and do similar things, but when you get down to it, it’s an entirely different language.

And if you haven’t pre-ordered a copy yet, please consider doing so. As a thank-you for pre-ordering, I give you a photo of some poor dog dressed as an Oompa Loompa.

When I was a kid someone bought me a cassette tape of Bette Midler’s debut album, The Divine Miss M, a really fun and sometimes campy collection of songs that show off her lovely and often underrated voice.

My favorite song on the album, after “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (and “Chapel of Love” and “Delta Dawn” - for real, it’s a good album) was “Friends” an ode to the importance of friendship, that no matter what, relationships are ultimately what make life worth living.

As usual, Bette is right. Friendships don’t just make life more fun. Strong, enriching relationships can literally help you live longer, protect children from the adverse effects of being bullied, and even improve cognitive ability in older adults. We are social animals and we need other people with us when times are good and bad.

I’ve had a rough summer and fall. My father has had some health issues that necessitated a few extended stays in the hospital. This coincided with some buzz-building travel I had to do for The Bullet Swallower, meaning that I was trying to help and support my family from afar while putting on a happy face and chatting up my book because the world doesn’t stop moving just because we’re struggling. My daughter’s bat-mitzvah was in October, an event which requires, for those who don’t know, the same amount of planning and strategy as a wedding or hostile takeover of a mid-cap public company. And all of this went on while war rages between Israel and Hamas, a constant source of sadness and anxiety to me as a Jewish woman, a mother raising Jewish kids during a moment of unparalleled anti-semitism in the United States, and as a person who believes quite literally in the kabbalistic notion that all humans carry God’s divine light inside of them. Every death is a tragedy; God weeps at every one.

Friendship is not something that comes naturally to me. I was a socially awkward kid and often didn’t know what to say to kids at school. My parents were pretty private people and didn’t do a lot of entertaining, and so I didn’t have a ton of examples of friendship at home. But I did watch a lot of television and so I knew from shows like Boy Meets World, Full House, and even Roseanne, that friendship was the cornerstone of happiness for most of the world.

So I’ve been trying, for as long as I can remember, to add friends to my life. And I’ve been really lucky so far. I’m still in regular touch with all 3 of my college roommates. I’ve recently reconnected with some friends from high school and have been seeing them when I’m back in Texas. And when I moved to Massachusetts 2 years ago I knew I would have to make a major effort to make friends in my new town - something that’s not so easy in your ‘40s. But luckily again my efforts paid off and I now have a busy social calendar and some deepening friendships with some incredible people.

The wealth friendships have brought to my life was really apparent last month when I got to have most of my good friends in one room for my daughter’s bat mitzvah, something that hasn’t happened since my wedding.

Likewise in the first shocking days of the war, it was speaking to friends that really helped me make sense of my complicated and contradictory feelings. Checking in with people, sharing experiences, and venting and letting others vent was one small way I could help. Being able to do something in the face of so much hatred and violence felt really meaningful.

In her masterful book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell writes about how human brains are actually not great at thinking complex thoughts on their own.

We think better with a partner, in conversation, our ideas getting honed by bumping up repeatedly against someone else’s. This is how we get Socratic dialogues, winning imaginary arguments in the shower, and this pretty good short book about five women arguing about Peter Sellers.

We need friends, now more than ever. In a fractured world that often feels like an ocean of tiny islands constantly drifting further apart, we need to hold onto the people we love tighter than ever.

Every Saturday in synagogue we read A Prayer for Peace. It is a cry for help and a reminder that we were not brought into the world for hatred. I will leave you with the closing words of the prayer which weigh heavier on my heart with each passing week.

And so,
we ask your compassion upon us;
raise up, by us, what is written:

I shall place peace upon the earth
and you shall lie down safe and undisturbed
and I shall banish evil beasts from the earth
and the sword shall not pass through your land.

So may it be.
And we say:
Amen.

So I went with Oubliette.

What is an oubliette? I have my 10th grade European history teacher, Mrs. Dickerson, to thank for introducing me to the concept. It’s a medieval dungeon shaped rather like a bottle with a narrow opening and a wide base, the point being that once you’re inside one, it is inescapable. Oubliette, from the French word oublier, meaning “to forget,” is, in the words of Hoggle from Labyrinth, “a place you put people…to forget about ‘em.”

So why have I named my newsletter after a medieval prison? The short answer is, I’m not sure. The word is very potent for me and carries a lot of different meanings and pathways to interesting concepts. It’s a prison, which makes me think of “a prison of one’s own making.” How might we entrap ourselves in old habits, in negative feelings, in bad relationships? It’s a place we put people and things we want to forget. What repressed memories, feelings, fears, and bugaboos are we hiding in deep caverns within ourselves? Have the pathways to these dark and forgotten places totally grown over, or can we find our way back to them? It’s a place to put people and things we want to forget…and yet it’s also a place to preserve things. Putting someone or something in an oubliette ensures they stay put. How do we preserve memories or feelings by locking them up inside ourselves? Or could an oubliette be a good thing? A place to hide, to slip away to? A dark, contemplative pit not unlike the one Toru Okada goes into in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?

I think an oubliette is all these things and probably dozens more, so I’m using it as a catch-all for what I hope this newsletter will be: A regular descent into burning topics, obsessions, flights of fancy. I promise to keep to my monthly (or, let’s be honest, less than monthly) posting schedule. And I promise to entertain and (hopefully) enlighten, the newsletter like a delicious chocolate chip cookie with spinach blended up and hidden inside. Though, tbh, that sounds kinda gross.

New stuff:

I had the enormous pleasure of speaking to Hilary Leichter, author of the surrealist workplace comedy, Temporary, about her newest novel, Terrace Story, out now. It’s about a young family living in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn't there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller's dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.

Annndddd (drumroll please):

The Bullet Swallower is available for pre-order! And not only that, but Barnes & Noble Rewards and Premium Members get 25% off all pre-orders from September 6 through September 8!

Pre-orders are so, so important because they show publishers that there is interest in a book and that they should put their marketing muscle behind it. So if you were planning on buying my new novel, (and like, you totally should) please consider placing a pre-order. It’s like a gift from your present self to your future self. By the time January 23rd rolls around you will have forgotten you bought the book, and so when it comes in the mail it’ll be like a late Christmas/Hanukkah surprise - yay!

And if you’re not a Barnes & Noble shopper, it’s also available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local indie.

Thanks for reading and may we all stay clear of any hidden prisons, that is, unless you really want to enter one.

xoxo,

Elizabeth

Share Oubliette

I've been reading a lot and listening to a lot of audio books, including How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, a fascinating look at the ways tech companies manipulate our attention and destroy our ability to be present in the world. I'm also reading Soil by Camille Dungy, which is about gardening and the focused attention it requires, and how gardening has changed the way the author sees herself fitting into the natural environment. Do you see a theme here?

So this summer I hope to spend a lot of time outside in the garden, kayaking on the lake, having friends over to enjoy our deck, and trying to notice more of the world. And growing so many beans. Seriously, like way, way too many beans. I anticipate giving away bushels of them in August. 

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together...

I am very excited to finally share with you the cover for The Bullet Swallower, which will be making its debut in the world 1/23/24! 

A dazzling magical realism western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez, The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generations in the making.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. He's good with his gun and is drawn to trouble but he's also out of money and out of options. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children, and so when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it--with his younger brother Hugo in tow. But when the heist goes awry and Hugo is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge that endangers not only his life and his family, but his eternal soul.

In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico's most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. In its ancient pages, Jaime learns about the multitude of horrific crimes committed by his ancestors. And when the same mysterious figure from Antonio's timeline shows up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors' crimes, unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family saga that's epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author's own great-grandfather, The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.
 

"An utterly original, wild ride rendered by Gonzalez James' masterful hand that turns the traditional redemption narrative on its head. In cracking open her own family legends, The Bullet Swallower brings to vibrant, three dimensional life the people and history of the Mexican and Texas border. Full of heart and humor, the magic in this book is not what is invented, but that it makes you wonder what it is, in all our histories, we may have forgotten?"--Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming

It's available for preorder now, anywhere books are sold. And if you can't wait, my publisher is sponsoring a Goodreads Giveaway right now. Click here to enter for your chance to win an advance copy. 

I did stuff:

I have a short story in the latest issue of Southern Humanities Review, which you can read an excerpt of here. The actor John Slattery makes an appearance in the story, and if you don't know who he is, well, he's an iconic silver fox: 

Early this month I also helped organize the very first Latinx Writers Weekend at Grub Street's new headquarters in Boston. We had an amazing lineup of authors and publishing experts including Angie Cruz, Rio Cortez, Saraciea Fennell, and many others. It was a really meaningful weekend of celebration, education, and community. Mil gracias to Grub Street and all our readers and attendees! Here's me with Dominicana author Angie Cruz: 

And I'm going to stop here so I can step away from my desk and try to enjoy what's left of the sunshine, at least for a little while!

xoxo,
Elizabeth 

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea and The Bullet Swallower (forthcoming 2024), and the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Originally from South Texas, she currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Say hello on Instagram or Facebook!

But why am I so exhausted? And am I the only one? 

I'm not alone, it turns out. "We've hit peak exhaustion," says one report from New Zealand. And burnout among young people and women is at an all-time high. Anecdotally, in my capacity as a (former) editor, I've had an incredible number of emails go unanswered, and have seen a tremendous amount of people just disappear, ghosting on their obligations, not turning in work. And unlike what some pundits would like us to believe, I don't believe Americans have spontaneously decided to become slackers. I think people are just overburdened and simply can't keep up.
 

And as to why...the answer is complicated.  

The world feels chaotic and terrifying right now. Gun violence, political instability, corporate greed and malfeasance, economic woes, war, pandemic, erosion of human rights, mental health crises, climate change, AI-based job displacement....like, take your pick, lol. There's a bloody lot going on that's bad. So even reading the news feels overwhelming. And our phones are built to keep us constantly plugged in and scrolling, pinging us all day with little jolts of red-bannered adrenaline mixed with a steady morphine drip of likes and views. We're functionally addicted to distraction and bad news. 

Add to that the more immediate terrors of inflation, job insecurity, debt, and illness, all exacerbated by the pandemic, it's no wonder many of us have just hit a wall.   

I can also say that, in my own case, I have a tendency to overcommit. Just a little. 
 

Why did I think I could carry all these swords? Who needs seven swords anyway? 

My problem with saying yes to everything is essentially a problem of estimation. I have little to no ability to estimate the time it will take me to perform a task, and so when I say "Sure, I'll write a book review!" my brain doesn't take into any account the hours it will take me to read a book, nor the hours it will take me to write a review. A book review could be an investment of anywhere from 10-40 hours depending on the book. Ditto with me agreeing to teach a class. Ditto with me agreeing to helm a literary festival...or edit a magazine...or write a screenplay....and the list goes on and on. So this January, when I looked at what I was supposed to do the first 6 months of 2023, my stomach tied itself up into knots. 

I had agreed to teach two classes, write 3 book reviews, conduct 2 author interviews, write 1 film treatment and 1 screenplay, moderate 2 conference panels at two different conferences on the West Coast, as well as edit a magazine, launch a chapbook, write the rough draft of my third novel, do several rounds of copy edits for my second novel, give an author talk at my local library, moderate 4 conversations with 4 different authors locally, run a half marathon, and plan and host a 3-day literary festival in Boston. And play King Ahasuerus in my synagogue's Purim play. 

I look adorable though, don't I??

Obviously this was too much. I sadly left The Rumpus because I couldn't keep up with the workload anymore. And I ended up dropping out of the half marathon because I didn't feel like I'd trained enough. I hate flaking on commitments, but I just couldn't do it all. I felt like I was drowning all the time. 

Amidst all the chaos, one of the author interviews I conducted was with Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives. This is an extraordinary book about using poetry in place of, or perhaps in companion to, religion. For what is religion, she says, but a combination of poetry and ritual? 

The book is an incredible meditation on the power of poetry, but it's also a generous and insightful look at what ails us today and how we may find solace in poems and in communion with others. In a section on meditation, Hecht writes about exactly our present circumstance of being overstretched and overburdened: 

"The iconic modern person is sketched with a short attention span, but a long capacity for worry…We get hit with so much life to manage and yet can feel that the struggle is making us miss out on life.”

Sound familiar??

So what's the solution? Besides throwing our phones in the ocean and taking an extended holiday in Switzerland? I think it's to be found in noticing. In slowing down. In taking stock. In breathing. In walking. In reaching out and speaking. In hobbying, reading, tasting, laughing. In saying no. Easier said than done, I know. Time is a luxury not equally shared. But unplugging for a little while, just long enough to sit outside for five minutes and listen to the wind in the trees, is a start. 

And so I will leave you with the poem, "To Daffodils" by Robert Herrick. May your spring be restful and bright, before your hours too, dry away. 

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attain'd his noon.

Stay, stay,

Until the hasting day

Has run

But to the even-song;

And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

xoxo,
Elizabeth

Upcoming events!

If you're in Sharon, MA I will be speaking at the Sharon Public Library tomorrow night at 6:30! A Comedy of Failures: My Path to Publication will be sort of a comedic TED talk about my long and circuitous path to publication and the many (many) potholes along the way. Refreshments will be provided. Register here.

• On May 4th I'll be in conversation with the inimitable Cleyvis Natera, author of Neruda on the Park, at Porter Square Books, 50 Liberty Dr. in Boston. This event is in partnership with Grub Street and Boston Writers of Color. 

• On May 11 I'll be joined in conversation by the wonderful Christine Kandic Torres, launching the paperback of her hit novel, The Girls in Queens. We'll be at Inkfish Books on May 11. More info soon!

• And on June 15 I'll be back at the Sharon Public Library to speak with Massachusetts favorite Connie Hertzberg Mayo about her latest historical fiction, The Sharp Edge of Mercy.  

Hope to see you there!
 

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (SFWP, 2021) and The Bullet Swallower (forthcoming, 2024), and the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (Texas Review Press, 2023). Originally from South Texas, she currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Say hello on Instagram or Facebook!

However it did give me an opportunity to wear my velvet blazer, so it was all worth it. 

And this AWP was extra special because while I was there I got to release my chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers! Available now! From Texas Review Press! 

I had a wonderful time hanging out with the TRP crew, signing books, and doing a live reading from the chapbook, including doing voices and acting a bit (it is a short play after all). And as part of the launch I was invited by David Gutowski at Large Hearted Boy to do a playlist for the chapbook. It's the 1960s so get ready for a lot of Burt Bacharach, liquid eyeliner, gin martinis, and bad teeth. And the wonderful Brendan O'Meara had me on his podcast, Creative Nonfiction, to talk about Peter Sellers, coping with anxiety, and sweet, sweet alcohol. Available wherever pods are cast. 

And the absolute best part of launching my chapbook was coming back to my hotel room to find the utterly stunning bouquet of flowers my writing group sent in congratulation. I took like 40 pictures of them because they were so pretty I couldn't believe it. 

And no AWP visit would be complete without the requisite book haul. Pictured below are the things I picked up - I'm reading Black Women Writers at Work right now and it is outstanding! It starts with an interview with Maya Angelou so that's all I need to say about that. 

I've been a busy little betty this spring too - I published 2 book reviews with Southwest Review: Astrid Roemer's 1982 classic, On A Woman's Madness, newly translated from the Dutch, and Yuri Herrera's latest short story collection, Ten Planets, also newly translated and in stores this week. 

And I think that's it - whew! 

Tune in next month when I'll be discussing the fact that our government keeps telling us aliens definitely exist and they don't know what to do about it. Fun times! 

Nanu nanu,
Elizabeth 
 

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (available now) and The Bullet Swallower (forthcoming 2024), and the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (forthcoming 2023). She is the Interviews Editor at The Rumpus. Originally from South Texas, she currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Say hello on Instagram or Facebook!

And February has been nonstop as well: I reviewed Mariana Enriquez's horrifying (and horrifyingly good) novel, Our Share of Night, I have a review coming out very soon of Astrid Roemer's On a Woman's Madness, and I'm shortly headed out to the West Coast for the San Francisco Writers Conference where I'll be on panels about writing, publishing, and adapting books to screenplays. 

And meanwhile I've been busy preparing to launch my new chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers, hitting shelves March 22!

Now, if you know who Peter Sellers is, you should probably call your doctor because you're definitely due for a mammogram or prostate exam. And if you DON'T know who Peter Sellers is, don't worry because I'm going to educate you. 

Peter Sellers (1925-1980) was a British comedian best known for his impressions and silly voices. He played Inspector Clouseau in the original Pink Panther movies and the eponymous Dr. Strangelove in the Stanley Kubrick film. 

In 1967 Sellers starred in a big budget spy spoof called Casino Royale, a film loosely (very loosely) based on the Ian Fleming novel of the same name, wherein MI6, in an attempt to confuse the enemy, designates a bunch of agents James Bond 007 and sets them loose across Europe to battle the baddies. But what maybe began as a straightforward spoof devolved into utter chaos as the film's producer hired over a dozen screenwriters and five directors and had them work independently, not allowing anyone to know what the others were doing. The final result is two and a half hours of plotless insanity - Orson Welles doing magic tricks, Peter Sellers in a Hitler costume, Woody Allen hiccuping down to nuclear annihilation, plus a UFO, a chimp in an orange wig, and David Niven in a bath with a teenage girl. 

 Just no...on so many levels. 

And while Peter Sellers cannot be blamed fully for the problems with this film, he is responsible for a lot of it. Several screenwriters and directors were hired at his insistence, he became so intimidated by Orson Welles' presence in the film that he refused to be on set with him....despite that they shared a scene together (they had to be filmed on alternating days and the scenes spliced together). Sellers was frequently late, he punched one director in the face, and he even demanded that one costly set be struck down and completely reworked when his dead mother visited him in a dream and told him she didn't like it. 

Oh and he also fired a gun right at Jacqueline Bisset's face. 

So...okay, who cares? Peter Sellers was a jerk. Big deal. Why did you write an entire book about him, Elizabeth? 

Indeed. Why did I write an entire book about him? It's a hard question to answer. And in a way this chapbook (publishing-speak for a short book) is an answer to that question. I find Peter Sellers to be a really captivating person. He was so good at impressions and silly voices that he believed he actually lost himself inside all the pretending, that along the way he forgot who he really was. He guest starred on The Muppet Show shortly before he died, and when Kermit the Frog told him he didn't have to put on an act, that he could just be himself, Sellers replied, "There is no me, I do not exist. There used to be a me... but I had it surgically removed." 

Was he joking? Perhaps. Was there truth in his jest? I think so. His outstanding performance in Being There, playing an idiot onto whom others project what they want to believe, says to me that Sellers had a very keen appreciation of himself and his role in Hollywood. And I think that kind of awareness is just so tragic. 

Honestly I could go on and on about Peter Sellers...which I do in my book! So if you want to read more about Peter Sellers, the shitshow insanity of making Casino Royale, plus a lot of feminist musings on #MeToo and the legacy of terrible men, then you should pre-order my book! I can genuinely promise you have never read anything like it. 

I am also happy to announce that I have a brand-spanking-new website redesigned by the incomparable Mira T. Lee, whose work I cannot recommend enough. I've got blurbs up there for Peter Sellers and The Bullet Swallower (more soon!) as well as new writing and new events. 

Kisses and abrazos,
Elizabeth 
 

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (available now) and The Bullet Swallower (forthcoming 2024), and the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (forthcoming 2023). She is the Interviews Editor at The Rumpus. Originally from South Texas, she currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Say hello on Instagram or Facebook!

According to Bessel van der Kolk, the man who pretty much wrote the book on trauma, "Trauma affects the entire human organism--body, mind, and brain, [creating a state wherein the] body continues to defend against a threat that belongs to the past." In other words, to (maybe) quote William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." It lives forever, rent free, in our bodies, and will come out to bedevil us when we least expect it. Fun!  

I've been thinking a lot about trauma this fall, as I happened to read The Body Keeps the Score around the same time I saw Paul Sehgal's article for the New Yorker: "The Case Against the trauma plot." Her contention is that authors and filmmakers have made trauma synonymous with backstory, where a character's personality is explained through the residual effects of some awful thing that happened long ago. This, she writes, reduces a character to a set of symptoms. "Trauma came to be accepted as a totalizing identity...Trauma trumps all other identities, evacuates personality, remakes it in its own image." Evacuates personality? Well, yeesh.

And she makes a compelling argument. After reading the article I started seeing the trauma plot everywhere: in Motherhood (a book I adore) the protagonist's reluctance to have a baby is gradually revealed to stem from the fact that her grandmother survived the Holocaust, and the echoes of that trauma have not yet finished reverberating through the family. In Ted Lasso the main character reveals in Season 2 that he experienced something horrific, and we are now to accept that this accounts for his sometimes obtuse behavior;
As I writer I will admit that it's tempting to use a trauma plot. It feels true, and it feels generous, to peel back the onion layers of an old curmudgeon and discover that he's a war veteran, or to allow that a hoarder might surround herself with thousands of teddy bears because she was homeless as a child and needs comfort and stability. But I do agree with Sehgal that it reduces a character to their worst moment, it ignores the ability of most people to transcend unfortunate circumstances, and it makes a neat diagram of a personality, drawing a straight line from there to here, when in reality people are complicated and contradictory and utterly baffling. I mean, look at Kanye....

So in my 3rd novel (Squee! Yes, I'm writing a 3rd novel) I'm consciously attempting to not do this, to stay in the present, to not excuse or explain things based on something that happened long before. I don't know if I'll be successful - understanding the present through the lens of the past is really how I think, history buff and armchair psychologist that I am - but it will be an interesting experiment: Can I let the past die? Can I let it live in the past? 
 

And now, an announcement

I am very excited to reveal the cover of my chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers, which will be out March 22!

Five Conversations About Peter Sellers is an essay that begins as an exploration of my burgeoning obsession with Peter Sellers, and specifically his role in hijacking and derailing production of the spy spoof, Casino Royale, in the late '60s. But what begins as a reported piece on how the film set erupted into chaos, quickly devolves into its own chaos as the essay splits into 5 different narrators, each with their own idea of what the essay is actually about. Is it about how Peter Sellers and his oversize ego ruined Casino Royale? Is it about how society has too long allowed horrible men to run the world? Is it an exploration of the nature of the essay as a creative form? Or is Peter Sellers and his genius at impersonation actually a vehicle through which I probe my own shifting identity as a bi-ethnic person? The answer is...yes. 

It's available for pre-order now, and if anyone out there happens to be a theater director, or knows one, it's an essay-in-conversation and could easily be adapted for the stage. Let's collab - hit me up! 
 

But wait, there's more...

My second novel, The Bullet Swallower, is coming out in January 2024 (I believe). 

And drumroll please.........

I am so excited that I can finally share the good news that Mona at Sea has been optioned for a feature film! I've wanted to get into the movie business for pretty much as long as I can remember, so this is an absolute dream come true. A lot still has to happen between now and the red carpet, but I'll keep you posted. 

Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a tolerable and trauma-free holiday season!

xoxo,
Elizabeth 

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (available now) and The Bullet Swallower (forthcoming 2024), and the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (forthcoming 2023). She is the Interviews Editor at The Rumpus. Originally from South Texas, she currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Say hello on Instagram or Facebook!

When I was a kid, Daylight Savings Time always ended about a week before Halloween. As a child I assumed this was on purpose so that it would be pitch dark by 6pm in Texas, and trick-or-treating could be done under cover of darkness, as God intended. Now they've gone and moved DST to after Halloween, possibly to decrease energy use (or maybe to increase it? I don't care enough to look it up) but I always think it's coming up before Halloween and I get all turned around. 

The amount of darkness on Halloween is a rather moot point for me now that I live in Massachusetts - it gets dark in the afternoon whether Congress approves it or not. But there's something about the waning daylight that seems to trigger something in us, sending us burrowing under the covers, drinking more hot beverages, and turning towards creepier, spookier entertainments. And I'm all about it. Let's go dark. 

If you know me, you know I have a fondness for the twisted and macabre. Even if you don't know me, you probably know this - I have been known to share my extensive knowledge of demonology with complete strangers at dinner parties....and that's why I sometimes don't get invited back.  
 

I know that somehow my fascination with death and monsters and ghosts and witches stems from growing up Catholic and Mexican and living through the 1980s during the height of Satanic Panic. A religion that tacitly endorses the concept of exorcism, plus a culture that, according to Octavio Paz, is characterized by it's willingness to "contemplate horror," plus a childhood steeped in media that was obsessed with devil worship practically in my own backyard, all combined to make me profoundly drawn to the dark side. Also, like, it's just cool.

But is there value in horror? Do we get any benefit from imagining creatures in the darkness? Absolutely yes. In a very primitive sense, I think the presence of monsters allows us to absolve ourselves of wrongdoing and blame our actions on supernatural elements - ie, "The devil made me do it!" Ghosts give us comfort, allowing us to believe that life exists after death and giving us hope that we might visit or be visited by our loved ones. And let's be honest: Monsters are real. They don't have horns or claws and they don't sneak around sucking the blood of goats at night, but open up the homepage of any news site and you'll see monsters in human form committing murder, child abuse, war crimes. Me thinking about hierarchies of demons might just be me trying to make sense of the fiendish people I see at work in the world. When I embrace the idea of ghoulish supernatural beings, perhaps that's an easier pill to swallow than the hideous reality that some people are pure evil.   

The other thing about horror stories is that they're almost never about the scary monster. There's the scary monster threatening to kill everyone, but the real horror is usually something that has already happened offscreen, and with which the characters must now grapple. In Midsommar, Florence Pugh is put through hell once she gets chosen to lead the weird Swedish pagan cult, but that's nothing compared to what she'd already gone through before the movie even starts - her sister killed herself and her parents by filling the house with carbon monoxide.

Ditto with The Babadook - the monster is terrifying, but the real horror is that the child and his mother must go on living after the boy's father dies. 

All this is to say, I'm noticing my writing is getting darker, more horrifying, and I think this is a natural, maybe even healthy, maybe even inevitable response to the world we're living in. This year was awful. And it's not over yet. The real world is often much more terrifying than anything Stephen King could dream up. But rather than write about mass shooters and craven politicians, I'd rather write about demons and ghosts and aliens and things that go bump in the night. And yes, I'm working on some short stories and have started researching another novel. Fiendishness abounds....
 

Stuff I read

Keeping in the darkness, let's get into some border noir. Gabino Iglesias is a fantastic writer, a prolific book reviewer for NPR, and an all-around literary mensch. In his latest novel, The Devil Takes You Home, he takes us to his hometown of Austin, where we find Mario facing life with a terminally ill child and a growing mountain of debt. With no options left to him, he accepts a mission to rob a truck bringing narco money from Texas to Mexico. But where he goes along the way is pure hell. I will say, this book is DARK. Even the clerk at An Unlikely Story warned me before I bought it that it was going to be hard to read. And parts of it were for sure. But I was absolutely gripped, creeped out, enthralled, and could not look away. If you enjoyed The Only Good Indians, you will love this book. And for something a little lighter, you can watch the Instagram interview I just did with Gabino here. 

A little lighter, though no less weighty, is The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings, author of 2020's outstanding Lakewood. As with The Devil Takes You Home, in Giddings' book we begin with grief (see a recurring theme here?) After Josephine's mother has been missing without a trace for many years, her father has decided they formally need to declare her dead. But upon reading her mother's will, Josephine finds cryptic instructions telling her to go to a mysterious island in the middle of Lake Superior, purportedly the home of a colony of witches living away from a society that would entrap them, punish them, and regulate their bodies. Sound familiar?? It's a lushly psychological and engrossing novel that's eerily timely and should enter the feminist horror canon alongside The Handmaid's Tale and Red Clocks. 

I wrote stuff

I wrote stuff this month, mainly the final edits for The Bullet Swallower - huzzah! - but nothing that's available yet on the internet. 

However, I have 3 cool things coming up:

• On Saturday, Oct. 29, 11-1, I'll be signing copies of Mona at Sea at Rozzie Bound Co-Op in Boston along with Cleyvis Natera, author of Neruda on the Park

• On Sunday, Oct. 30 I'll be in conversation with Christine Kandic Torres, author of The Girls in Queens, Barnes & Noble, Walpole, MA, 2pm

• And on Nov. 28 I'm teaching a virtual class through Story Studio Chicago, called, "Make Yourself Heard: Writing Strong Voice in Fiction"

And that's all for now. Have a safe Halloween and don't forget to check your candy! 

xoxo,
Elizabeth 
 

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (available now) and The Bullet Swallower (forthcoming 2023), and the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (forthcoming 2023). She is the Interviews Editor at The Rumpus. Originally from South Texas, she currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Say hello on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook!

I went to Portugal for the first time this summer, a destination my husband and I chose because we'd had several friends recommended it, and because it was a direct flight from Boston (we are practical travelers, it seems, above all else). We stayed only in the Lisbon area (the umbrellas over Rua da Rosa pictured above), with excursions to Cascais, Sintra, and Paço de Arcos. One of the highlights of the trip for me, and something I was not expecting to see, was The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch, a triptych housed at Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. 

If you've known me for any amount of time, you know that eventually I'll get talking about Bosch and how much I love him. But love isn't exactly the right word. Obsessed maybe? Fanatically devoted to? I have seen Bosch paintings In Madrid, New York, Philadelphia, London, New Haven, Kansas City, and Paris. There are not that many Bosch paintings in extant, and so it's possible (hopefully, probable) that I could see all of his work in my lifetime.

He's a highly misunderstood painter. I think just about every time I've seen one of his paintings in person someone within earshot makes a comment asking, "What kind of crazy-ass drugs was that guy on?" It's easy to dismiss strange things in this way, and given the absolute batshit nature of many of Bosch's paintings, I can see why this would be an explanation many people would reach for.
 

Like, I mean...

And yeah...

And don't forget this cool guy.

His weirdness comes from a combination of religiosity (for instance some of his strange torture devices make sense when paired with Biblical quotes from the prophets Isaiah or Ezekiel); plays on words lost on us since they're in Dutch or German; references to popular songs or sayings from 500 years ago, also lost on us now; and allegorical allusions to alchemy and the search (real or metaphoric) for eternal life (a theory proposed by my former professor, Dr. Lucinda Dixon). 

But he was also just a really playful painter. You could seriously look at one of his paintings for hours, days, weeks and not run out of things to look at. His paintings are so full of movement, ornamentation, drama, fury, and humor, and what's so astounding to me every time I look at one is the sheer multitude of stories he managed to pack into every one. Each character is living out their own drama amidst a hundred other people (or pig nuns) simultaneously going through their own thing. 

Bosch is who actually inspired me to start writing. Back in college, in Prof. Dixon's class, I would find myself daydreaming about all the stories contained in his work. I'd get stuck thinking about old knife-ears, imagining what kind of backstory there was for that guy, and then ten minutes would go by and I'd realize I missed a big chunk of the lecture (I think I got a B in that class - ah well). 

It was the sense of play, I think, that struck me about his work, and all the hidden meanings concealed within each figure (I will admit to a certain Da Vinci Code-level of appreciation of his work back in college - ah to be young and believe you could find buried treasure by looking hard enough at a painting!) 

And I've been thinking about a sense of play lately as it relates to writing - how some of the books I've enjoyed recently have been playful, surprising, richly ornamented, and wonderfully wonderfully weird. 

Valleyesque, for instance, is one such book. It's a short story collection by Fernando A. Flores, a writer I have followed for years because he's also from South Texas and hey - there aren't that many of us. There stories are definitely unpredictable, definitely surreal. In my favorite, "Ropa Usada," a young woman goes to a giant warehouse filled with used clothes because she wants to start selling used clothes online to make money for college. But once inside, the warehouse is much larger than she'd anticipated - she gets lost, she gets assaulted by a clique of girls who have cornered the market on online clothes resale, she finds a tribe of people who live in huts made of used clothes and she has to run when one of them tries to make her his bride. It's just so fun.

I'm trying to write a short story now about a YouTube content creator who finds that her subscribers are now able to livestream her life from inside her brain, and I was having a lot of trouble figuring out how to end it. I took the question to Twitter, as you do, and someone suggested adding an alligator. So I thought about and now there's an alligator running around the story. It may not stay, but I think the story needed exactly that injection of fun and unpredictability. Of play. 

I definitely can't say that Friday Black is fun - it's downright heartbreaking and hard to read at times - but it carries the same sense of surrealism and unpredictability that I loved in Valleyesque, and it's a short story collection that I think is going to become a classic of American literature. The title story "Friday Black" is an absolute merciless (and funny?) takedown of Black Friday sales and the lengths people will go to to get a bargain. 

I did some stuff

I interviewed Tom Perrotta this summer about his Election sequel, Tracy Flick Can't Win:

"A lot of us have great ideas about ourselves when we’re young, and then when we’re middle age, we’re kind of rueful or wistful about them because life has a way of taking that out of you."

I'm teaching an online class with Story Studio Chicago on November 28 called "Making Yourself Heard: Writing Strong Voice in Fiction." The number 1 reason that agents and editors cite when they pass on a manuscript is lack of compelling narrative voice. In this class we'll cover what voice is, give examples of strong voice in fiction, and go over tips for strengthening voice in your drafts. We'll finish with an exercise where we write in different voices. Let's get loud!

I'm also teaching an in-person 4-week seminar on personal essay writing through the Sharon Public Library - stayed tuned for details. 

And finally I'll be joining the brilliant Cleyvis Natera at a book signing in Boston on October 29th at the Rozzy Bound Bookstore. If you're in the area please stop by - and as always I will have copies of Mona at Sea on hand. 

And that's all for now. Be well and stay warm (or cool)!

xoxo,
Elizabeth 
 

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (available now) and The Bullet Swallower (forthcoming 2023), and the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (forthcoming 2023). She is the Interviews Editor at The Rumpus. Originally from South Texas, she currently lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Say hello on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook!